Judges Question Ross Ulbricht's Life Sentence in Silk Road Appeal

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Judges Question Ross Ulbricht's Life Sentence in Silk Road Appeal

A February 2015 courtroom sketch depicting defendant Ross William Ulbricht receiving his guilty verdict in New York.

AP

Over a year has passed since a federal judge sentenced Ross Ulbricht to life in prison without parole after he was convicted of creating and running the vast dark web drug bazaar known as Silk Road. Today Ulbricht returned to court to face a panel of judges to appeal his conviction—but it was his harsh sentence that seemed to most draw their focus.

In oral arguments in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday morning, Ulbricht's defense lawyer sparred with federal prosecutors over a range of issues, including the credibility of evidence, the role of two corrupt agents in the investigation, and the defense's blocked attempt to call two expert witnesses to testify on Ulbricht's behalf. But the defense seemed to elicit the most sympathy from the three-judge panel when it attacked Ulbricht's life sentence after he was convicted for drug trafficking, money laundering, and leading an organized criminal enterprise.

In particular, the judges criticized a portion of the sentencing hearing in which parents of Silk Road buyers who had died of drug overdoses were called to testify. That testimony "put an extraordinary thumb on the scale that shouldn't be there," argued appellate judge Gerald Lynch. He went on to call the sentence "quite a leap."

"Does this [testimony] create an enormous emotional overload for something that's effectively present in every heroin case?" Lynch asked at one point. "Why does this guy get a life sentence?"

But Forrest also pointed to evidence brought forward at trial that Ulbricht had paid to have six people killed, including a former employee and a blackmailer. None of the murders was carried out, nor was Ulbricht charged in connection with the schemes; instead, they appear to have been faked to scam Ulbricht, or in one case spoofed by a law enforcement sting operation. Nonetheless, in Ulbricht's sentencing hearing, Forrest argued, “There is ample and unambiguous evidence that [Ulbricht] commissioned...murders to protect his commercial enterprise."

Ulbricht's defense reiterated in the appeal hearing today that none of the alleged murder plots had actual victims. "We have no evidence they even occurred," Ulbricht's lead defense attorney Joshua Dratel said.

"Why does it matter if they happened or not?" Lynch responded. "The crimes of which the defendant was convicted carried a life sentence, did they not?"

Dratel responded that murder-for-hire typically carries a ten-year sentence not life. "Murderers don't get life sentences," Dratel said. "People who actually commit murder."

The prosecution, for its part, defended the inclusion of the alleged murder plots in Ulbrict's sentencing hearing, as well as the testimony about overdose victims. "This is unprecedented, the amount of drugs, the amount of harm," said prosecutor Eun Young Choi.

When the defense protested that they hadn't been allowed to bring forward an expert witness to talk about the possibility that Ulbricht's laptop had been hacked to plant evidence, Lynch quickly rebutted the point. "The jury didn't know in this day and age that computers can be hacked?" he asked. "Even the NSA gets hacked."

All of that seems to suggest that if Ulbricht has any chance of a new trial, it may not come from attacking the judicial process or the evidence that convicted him. Instead, his last hope of escaping a lifetime in prison may come from the severity of the sentence itself.